It stands for something

Usage examples of symbol.

In the context, the last interpretation is the most likely: the text as a whole abounds with alchemical symbols.

These papers, of which there are over 500, are chiefly concerned with sacred geometry and architecture, and cabalistic, Masonic, hermetic and alchemical symbols.

What little currency Alec had seen were crude lozenges of copper or silver, distinguished only by weight and a few crude symbols struck in.

Nysander opened his hand to show Alec a small cube of green stone, incised on each side with tiny symbols.

It was more agreeable to watch the clouds while the horses rested at the end of the furrow, to address, as did Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of poetic symbols.

Vieta in France first applied letters as general symbols of quantity, though the earlier algebraists used them occasionally, chiefly as abbreviations.

Because of this lack of shame in what to humans was an act more secret than prayer, the ancipital race was a symbol of lust.

What a preposterous glut of paper and ink he has amassed, loose leaves and envelopes and journals with spines and notebooks sewn with string, all neatly filled with his blockish, inelegant handwriting, all annotated with symbols in his own private code, signifying such things as further study needed or but is this really true?

I tried to discern which symbols in the writing were the equivalent of Apropos, but quickly gave up.

He drew a pen from his pocket, used it to jot aquick shorthand of symbols and letters on each of the six facesof the Box.

We hold moreover that they communicate their ideas in essentially the same manner as we do--that is to say, by the instrumentality of a code of symbols attached to certain states of mind and material objects, in the first instance arbitrarily, but so persistently, that the presentation of the symbol immediately carries with it the idea which it is intended to convey.

The last fact shows clearly that the higher powers of the mind can attain a high development on the basis of tactual and manipulatory abilities, and that these abilities can serve as the basis of a system of symbols of meanings hardly, if at all, less rich than is commonly developed from the basis of visual, auditory, and articulatory abilities.

The cult of Mithra, less widespread then than it has become since our expedition in Parthia, won me over temporarily by the rigors of its stark asceticism, which drew taut the bowstring of the will, and by its obsession with death, blood, and iron, which elevated the routine harshness of our military lives to the level of a symbol of universal struggle.

Lightning, like all authoritarian Judeo-Christian heresies, had its own share of this typically Occidental straight-line mystique, which was why even the Jews among them, like Zev Hirsch, accepted the symbol first suggested by Atlanta Hope: that most Euclidean of all religious emblems: the Cross.

I went right to it, and all my symbols were there -- circles, triangles, japps, mirks, rhomboids, bews, smims, fouders, hundreds more.